Heart Sutra, Part Three

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,


Heart Sutra, Part Three
Daiho-roshi

O Shariputra, remember, Dharma is fundamentally emptiness no birth, no death. Nothing is pure nothing is defiled. Nothing can increase, nothing can decrease.

This fundamental “emptiness” means that nothing that exists has an independent existence. Moreover, even the teachings and reality itself is empty in the same way.

All things, all processes, all energy is subject to change and is, indeed, in constant motion with no fixed point to be experienced or understood. When viewed in this way, our understanding of the acts of birth and death as separate, independent points in time, is false.

Birth and death are named points along a continuum of processes and not as static, independent events. Each are in themselves “empty.” That which has no permanence cannot be “born” as we in the west often understand the term, nor can it die, either. When we truly integrate this understanding, making it part of ourselves, we move beyond birth and death, and remain untouched by them.

This is very difficult for us as we tend to see in both linear and static terms. We see things as “there.” A stone is a stone. This way of seeing arises from a relative view. If we see with an absolute view, a view of hundreds of thousands of kalpas, a stone immediately loses its independence from all other things in all times. It is just one blink in a very large and constantly changing process. In truth, we are all the component parts and pieces, energy and matter of all of existence. Right here, right now, aware of itself.


Notions of purity and defilement arise from delusion, as do notions of increase or decrease. Pure and impure are ideas on the one hand and two sides of the same coin, on the other hand. Our practice invites us to ask, “What’s this?” at each perception and therefore at each breath, as we retain beginner’s mind, we reside in realization.

We live as buddhas by embracing life with dark in one hand and light in the other. Guiding each step is our heart/mind. In such a mind, no birth, no death, no pure, no defiled, no decrease, no increase: just this.